A public conversation I'm having with myself

Screen time

I was recently re-reading Pierre Berton’s 1967: Canada’s Turning Point and was struck by the following factlet: among Canada’s middle class (54% of the population) the average time spent watching TV in 1967 was six hours and twenty-six minutes every day.

This seemed high to me, but not impossible. 1967 was still early days, right around the time stations were beginning to broadcast in colour. I wondered how things compare today, but then thought that given how much has changed this would be like comparing apples and oranges. We don’t speak of TV watching any more but “screen time,” which encompasses all of the time spent “consuming media” on our various devices.

It was only a bit later that I was watching a podcast with Timothy Snyder where he mentioned that the most recent (2016) Nielsen study had it that Americans spend over 10 hours a day looking at screens. This really did impress me. That’s well over half your waking hours! I looked around for some information and found a CNN story on the report that Snyder was referencing. Perhaps the most startling reveal in it was that the number was up a full hour from what it had been only the year before.

But wait, it gets worse! I thought that the amount of time people spent working in offices where employees have to look at screens for nearly eight hours a day might be skewing the results. But according to the report teens are spending 9 hours a day “consuming media,” and I assume most of this is not work related. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if work was included in the original figures. This is from the story as reported by CNN:

“We examine large trends in penetration, users and usage across all platforms, show how different demos and race/ethnicity groups spend their media time, and explore the contributions of heavy users,” Glenn Enoch, Nielsen’s senior vice president of audience insights, wrote in a letter accompanying the report.

So, the report concluded that out of 168 hours in a week, we spend more than 50 with devices, said Douglas Gentile, professor of psychology at Iowa State University, who was not involved in the report but has studied how too much screen time affects children.

“The work week still takes up 40 of those hours, sleep at seven hours a night is 49, and if we assume all personal care — such as eating, bathing, dressing, preparing food — is three hours a day, then we have 58 hours a week left over for all other things,” Gentile said.

“This includes hobbies, sports, spending time with children, spending time with friends and romantic partners, reading, learning, exercise, participating in a faith community, volunteer work, house maintenance,” he added. “If people are spending over 50 hours a week with media for entertainment purposes, then there’s really no time left for any of the other things we value.”

Either screen time really is an addiction or else we don’t really value those other things in life we’re presumed to care about (friends, family) very much. Or both. Whatever way you look at it, this strikes me as scary. We really are giving up on reality.